Give them a little temporal power. (Picture from ThePeoples Cube.)
The ultimate solution to grievance is power. Power replaces grievance with new grievance. Western states have
propped up a host of different local occupiers throughout the Arab
world, fearing the wrath of radicals. What they have gotten in return is the wrath of radicals.
Democracy acknowledges this. Throw the bums out, get some new ones. Then throw them out. Each renewal brings cheers, each regime’s decline brings jeers. And we keep working at it. It’s the acceptance of the system which is its strength, the willing belief that we do have the power which gives us power.
The best way to transform a
radical into a true object of hatred is to give them power. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Iranians
were rejecting their Mullahs until we renewed their sense of grievance, targeting them as the Axis of Evil while most Iranians had come to regard them as an Axis of Weevils.
It was stupid, it was ignorant. And it didn’t work.
The most
grievous dictator of the Arab World, Moammar Qaddafi, eventually aged and
chose to deal with the reality in his nation, rejecting terrorism for
power, as old men will. Reform will follow his replacement, because all
dictators (no matter their cause) leave grievance in their wake.
No Islamic Jihadist movement has yet been given the responsibility
to make government work, and none is capable of making it work absent grievance. Why
not prove the case?
Saudi Arabia’s monarchs bought off its peoples’ grievances with support for extremism, just
as it bought off everything else. Take the oil out of Saudi Arabia and
the monarchy falls in an instant. But the succeeding government, even
if highly Islamic, would still be unable to meet expectations. This
would either mean it falls, or it becomes despotic, and suddenly the
terrorism shoe is on the other foot.
Republicans will call Afghanistan the counter-example. They will
note how the Taliban harbored Al Qaeda, and how Al Qaeda killed all
those people on 9/11. But while the Taliban harbored Bin Laden,
it was the Saudi government which created and financed him. It was not
Afghanistan which attacked us on 9/11. It was Saudi exiles, with the full connivance of a U.S. government which believed the enemy of our enemy was our friend.
While in power the Taliban tried hard to impose strict Islamic law
on their people. This included an unprecedented crackdown on opium
production, a crackdown which has since been reversed by the
U.S.-supported government of Hamid Karzai and his allied warlords. The best
thing we could do for our own War on Drugs, ironically, is to place the
Taliban back in power. But you won’t hear that from any American
politician.
And to those who fear a nuclear-armed Pakistan ruled by Mullahs, we have more such weapons, better delivery systems, and the power to make as many as necessary. Even Mullahs love their children.
The grievances of Al Qaeda lie in two places, in Arabia and
Palestine. The answer to the first is a true War Against Oil, which
will cut off the monarchy’s fuel, and force it to really deal with its
own people, rather than pretending to as it does now. Or cause its
overthrow.
The answer to the second is what it has always been, even-handed
negotiation that creates a viable Palestinian state. (Egypt and Israel
have been at peace for three decades.) Israelis know that their
absorption of the lands occupied since 1967 would quickly result in
either a majority-Muslim Israel, or in a genocide akin to what Hitler
did in the last century, which is a place very few are willing to go.
(Some are, now. But still, relatively few. Amazingly few, given the provocation.)
The problem is that escalating grievance has left Israel with no one
they can negotiate with. It will take time, money and patience to
change this, and some of the money must come from Israel, or else its
promises of peace will lack credibility. This is what Jimmy Carter
sought, what every American government until this most recent
government sought.
Grievance. This is the fuel that drives young Muslims to
murder, of themselves and of others. Take away the grievance and that
drive disappears.
Once a terrorist achieves power within their own country, they
become the government. Beat the man and you’re the man. The power of
grievance then goes on to your opposition, and you must either export
that grievance or project it, as Cuba has. It is our acceptance of this
aggrieved role, fueled by our hatred of Castro, which has kept him in
power for nearly 50 years. Will those who hate Castro do a better job
if given power after his death? Or will they only replace grievance with grievanc
e?
For my final stop, consider the United States. This decade appears,
on the surface, to be the triumph of the Religious Right in this
country. They have succeeded in winning government largess, and have
even gotten the Supreme Court’s acceptance of this.
But what has been going on in the pews, in response to this marriage
of church and state? What has been happening is a growing sense of
grievance, a growing revolt against those pastors, and those church
movements, which involve themselves in the messy work of governance.
Orson Scott Card (left) said it best, in his Secular Humanist Revival
Meeting, nearly a quarter-century ago." A church which attains the
power of the state becomes the state, and loses all its holiness. All its holiness!"
The power of government is poison for willing faith. Always has
been, always will be. Here and everywhere. (Even in Utah, which is why Card, a Mormon, prefers to live in North Carolina.) Those religious leaders who
obtain temporal power lose their followers, first slowly, then more
rapidly. They can inspire those who wield power, but once they grasp it
themselves they die, just like in the Indiana Jones movies, only
without the cool special effects.
Want to destroy religion? Give it political power. Make them the man
and we’ll tear them to shreds. Support the grievance and you will
become the hope of the world. Become the grievance and you become its
terror, and the cause of terror in the world.
